Friday, 12 January 2018

German Dark Albion + Class Bonuses in Lion & Dragon Q&A

So first off, we remind you that Lion & Dragon continues in the top-15 of RPGnow. It could still be nudged down into the top-10, but we need your help! Please share the link to L&D all over your social media, and help to promote this great game! Thanks.

Second, some Dark Albion news. Specifically, Dark Albion has received a new review. But it's not just any review... it's a German review.
My German is very poor, but it looks like "Rollenspiel zur Zeit der Rosenkriege" (roleplaying in the age of the Rose-war) was quite positive. Let's hope it gets a few German customers interested in picking it up as a bit of payback for what wfrp did with Germany!

Now, for the third order of the day: talking about levels and level gains in Lion & Dragon.

So we had this question about L&D from a reader: Q: So when leveling you get to choose one advancement option or randomly roll for two. How many advancement options total are there for a level? Three, Four, Five?
First, some background. Characters in Lion & Dragon do not make fixed advancements like most OSR games. Instead, you get base stats at level 1, and after that you either randomly roll or choose options of what you get when you level up. You always gain a small (baseline) amount of hit points, but if you don't roll or choose to improve saving throw, for example, your saving throw will not improve. Same goes with extra hp, attack bonuses, special skills and special powers. There's no neat table with steady advancement, instead you custom-advanced.
And you have a choice: you can either control the advancement but only pick ONE, or you can do it by chance but get TWO rolls.

So the question above is asking just how much choice does each class get.

The answer is that options are set up in tables by class. So at each level you roll on the same table. This might be hard to read, but here's an image featuring a couple of tables:

The number of options for each class vary. There are 7 entries for Clerics, 9 for fighters, 6 for magisters, 11 for thieves, 8 for Cymri, and 8 for Scots Men.

But it's a bit more complicated than that, because in some of the entries the Player still gets to choose between two or more options.

For example, if you're a Cleric and you roll a 4-5, you can EITHER choose to get a new miraculous power, or a +1 to the prayer check for an existing power. A Magister has one option where they can either get a new lore, or a +1 to an existing lore. A thief who rolls a 5 can choose between +2 in Urban Lore OR Wilderness Lore OR Court Lore OR learn a new language. Thieves have a couple of such options, and Cymri (who are jacks-of-all-trades) have several of these types of options, etc.

So, I hope that gives you some idea of what type of variety of options a Lion & Dragon character has. It means that every class is very strongly niche-protected, but every character in each class is going to be unique in terms of what they're focused on.